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JWG

at the Van Gogh drawings exhibit at the Met

November 21st, 2005

On Saturday, rsc and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The special draw was the Van Gogh exhibit of drawings. It was fascinating. Although his paintings such as Starry Night and Café Terrace on the Place du Forum are striking these drawings, are fascinating. I'd first expected mostly charcoal or pen and ink drawings but there were a number of water colors. His earlier drawings had excellent detail especially of people's workplaces. Some beautiful drawings with sky, water, and trees - some of which reminded me a bit of some photos taken by vaneramos.

Often at such exhibitions you see sketches drawn before a famous work was made. In his case many of these drawings were done afterwards - sometimes to send them to his brother or friend. Occasionally they were monochrome with little notes specifying the colors he used. Not bad getting a letter with an original Van Gogh in it.

I spent some time leafing through the book. He was a self taught artist who bought lots of books about how to draw or paint and did the lessons in them; he continued this through his whole short life.

This exhibit closes on Dec 31. We got there at about noon; the exhibit was crowded (this was a Saturday) but the queue to get in was just a handful of people. When we exited an hour and a half later the line was extremely long.

There is also a Prague (1347-1437) exhibit there that we saw - it closes Jan 3. I'm moving Prague up in priority in my list of places to visit.